Article published in:
Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children
Edited by Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh Fernandez
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5] 2019
► pp. 600–627

Investigating vulnerabilities in grammatical processing of bilinguals

Insights from Basque-Spanish adults and children

| Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language | Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478
| Université de Montréal | IKER UMR-5478 | Université Bordeaux-Montaigne
| Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Science, University of Oslo
Bilinguals show a large gap in their expressive-receptive abilities, in both languages. To date, most studies have examined lexical processing. The current study aimed to assess comprehension and production of verb agreement, i.e., grammatical processing, in bilinguals, and to examine the factors that might modulate them: exposure, age and language-specific morphological complexity. Twenty balanced Basque-Spanish bilinguals (10 adults and 10 children) were assessed on comprehension and production of subject-verb agreement in both languages and object-verb agreement in Basque. Twenty age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals were assessed in Spanish only. The results revealed a consistent gap in Basque in both children and adults, with an advantage for comprehension. In Spanish, a gap appeared in children only, with an advantage for production. The gap size did not vary with the amount of language exposure but with age and morphological complexity, suggesting that these factors modulate bilinguals’ grammatical processing.
Keywords: Basque-Spanish bilingualism, expressive-receptive grammatical gap, verb inflection
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17035.pou
References

References

Ågren, M., & van de Weijer, J.
(2013) Number problems in monolingual and bilingual French-speaking children: A production/comprehension divide. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 4, 25–50. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Giezen, & Pourquié
this issue). Basque-Spanish bilingual children’s expressive and receptive grammatical abilities. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Special Issue on Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children.
Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J., & Meir, N.
(2015) Assessing multilingual children disentangling bilingualism from language impairment. Bristol; Buffalo: Multilingual Matters. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bastiaanse, R.
(2008) Production of verbs in base position by Dutch agrammatic speakers: Inflection versus finiteness. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 21(2), 104–119. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bastiaanse, R., Rispens, J., Ruigendijk, E., Rabadán, O. J., & Thompson, C. K.
(2002) Verbs: Some properties and their consequences for agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 15(3–5), 239–264. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bates, D. M., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S.
(2015) Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–40. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ben Zeev, S.
The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive development. Child Development, 48, 1009–1018. Crossref
Blom, E., Vasić, N., & de Jong, J.
(2014) Production and Processing of Subject – Verb Agreement in Monolingual Dutch Children With Specific Language Impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57(3), 952–965. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bohman, T. M., Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., Mendez-Perez, A., & Gillam, R. B.
(2010) What you hear and what you say: Language performance in Spanish – English bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13(3), 325–344. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture of the Basque Government and Sociolinguistics cluster
(2013) Arrue Project. Retrieved from http://​www​.soziolinguistika​.eus​/arrue
Finn, A. S., Kalra, P. B., Goetz, C., Leonard, J. A., Sheridan, M. A., & Gabrieli, J. D. E.
(2016) Developmental dissociation between the maturation of procedural memory and declarative memory. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 142, 212–220. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Franck, J., Cronel-Ohayon, S., Chillier, L., Frauenfelder, U. H., Hamann, C., Rizzi, L., & Zesiger, P.
(2004) Normal and pathological development of subject – verb agreement in speech production: a study on French children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 17, 147–180. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Franco, L.
(2014) The lexical/functional divide in aphasic production: poorly studied aphasic syndromes and theoretical morpho-syntax: a collection of case studies in Italian. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., & Hahn, E. R.
(2013) Word comprehension and production asymmetries in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 489–509. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, T. A., Oller, D. K., Jarmulowicz, L., & Ethington, C. A.
(2012) The receptive – expressive gap in the vocabulary of young second-language learners: Robustness and possible mechanisms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 102–116. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gibson, T. A., Peña, E. D., & Bedore, L. M.
(2014) The receptive – expressive gap in bilingual children with and without primary language impairment. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 23(4), 655–667. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C., & Sandoval, T. C.
(2008) More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism, and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(3), 787–814. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Slattery, T. J., Goldenberg, D., Van Assche, E., Duyck, W., & Rayner, K.
(2011) Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: The frequency-lag hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140(2), 186. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Hsin, L., Culbertson, J., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T., & Legendre, G.
(2014) Revealing early comprehension of subject – verb agreement in Spanish. In Boston University Language Development Conference 38 Proceedings (pp. 158–70). Retrieved from http://​krieger​.jhu​.edu​/cogsci​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/70​/2017​/02​/Gonzalez​-Gomez​-et​-al​.-BUCLD38​-Proceedingscompressed3​.pdf
Hualde, J. I., & Ortiz de Urbina, J.
(eds.) (2003) A grammar of Basque. Mouton de Gruyter: Berlin. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hualde, J. I., & Zuazo, K.
(2007) The standardization of the Basque language. Language Problems and Language Planning, 31(2), 143–168. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, V. E., de Villiers, J. G., & Seymour, H. N.
(2005) Agreement without understanding? The case of third person singular /s/. First Language, 25(3), 317–330. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Keller, K., Troesch, L. M., & Grob, A.
(2015) A large receptive – expressive gap in bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 10–3389. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lapointe, S. G.
(1985) A theory of verb form use in the speech of agrammatic aphasics. Brain and Language, 24(1), 100–155. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Legendre, G., Culbertson, J., Zaroukian, E., Hsin, L., Barrière, I., & Nazzi, T.
(2014) Is children’s comprehension of subject – verb agreement universally late? Comparative evidence from French, English, and Spanish. Lingua, 144, 21–39. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lenth, R. V.
(2016) Least-Squares means: The R package lsmeans. Journal of Statistical Software, 69(1), 1–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leonard, L. B.
(2014) Specific language impairment across languages. Child Development Perspectives, 8(1), 1–5. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Litcofsky, K. A., Tanner, D., & van Hell, J. G.
(2016) Effects of language experience, use, and cognitive functioning on bilingual word production and comprehension. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20(6), 666–683. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Oller, D. K., Pearson, B. Z., & Cobo-Lewis, A. B.
(2007) Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(2). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pérez-Leroux, A. T.
(2005) Number problems in children. In C. Gurski (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistic Association Annual Conference. London, Canada. Retrieved from http://​westernlinguistics​.ca​/Publications​/CLA​-ACL​/CLA​-ACL2005​.htm
Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S.
(2014) Neural integration of language production and comprehension. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(43), 15291–15292. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
R Core Team
(2013) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Retrieved from http://​www​.R​-project​.org/
Pourquié, M.
(2013) Verb processing in Basque and French agrammatic aphasia: A ‘post-lexical access’ deficit. Aphasiology, Volume 27(12), 1472–1510. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2015) fLEX: Multilingual assessment of inFlectional and LEXical processing, Software, Intelectual property, 2016-01-88, Basque Government.Google Scholar
Rothweiler, M., Chilla, S., & Clahsen, H.
(2012) Subject – verb agreement in Specific Language Impairment: A study of monolingual and bilingual German-speaking children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 39–57. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ullman, M. T.
(2016) The declarative/procedural model: A neurobiological model of language learning, knowledge, and use. In G. Hickok & S. L. Small (Eds.), Neurobiology of language (pp. 953–968). San Diego: Academic Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Verhagen, J., & Blom, E.
(2014) Asymmetries in the acquisition of subject – verb agreement in Dutch: Evidence from comprehension and production. First Language, 34(4), 315–335. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Waxman, S., Fu, X., Arunachalam, S., Leddon, E., Geraghty, K., & Song, H.
(2013) Are nouns learned before verbs? Infants provide insight into a long-standing debate. Child Development Perspectives, 7(3), 155–159. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yan, S., & Nicoladis, E.
(2009) Finding le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children’s lexical access in comprehension and production. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12(3), 323–335. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

No author info given
2021.  In Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children [Benjamins Current Topics, 117], Crossref logo
Azpiroz, Maialen Iraola, Shanley E. M. Allen, Kalliopi Katsika & Leigh Fernandez
2019. Psycholinguistic approaches to production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4-5 ► pp. 505 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 may 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.